Five features iOS should steal from Android

We have a few ideas for what Apple should copy. Do you?

If you've come anywhere near a tech site in the last year or so, you've heard it all before. "iOS is getting stale compared to Android! It needs some new ideas!" Whether that's actually true is up for (heated) debate, but those with an open mind are usually willing to acknowledge that Apple and Google could afford to swap a few ideas when it comes to their mobile OSes.

So in a fantasy world where we could bring over some of the better Android features to iOS, which features would those be? Among the Ars staff, we sometimes have spirited "conversations" about what aspects would be the best for each company to photocopy. So, we thought we'd pick a few that might go over well with iOS users. Don't worry, we have a companion post of features that Android could afford to steal from iOS. The copying can go both ways.

No one wants iOS to become Android or vice versa. This is about recognizing how to improve iOS with features that would be useful to people depending on their smartphones for more than the occasional text or phone call. We recognize that Apple tries to keep an eye towards elegant implementation, too. So which features are we talking about? Glad you asked...

Google Now-style contextual services

For those who aren't familiar with Google Now, it can be a little complex to explain due to its wide range of services. (Check out Ryan Paul's writeup about it last August here on Ars.) On one side, Google Now does Siri-like voice actions, but that's not the part we want Apple to take from Android. The part we want is Google Now's ability to provide notifications and other services based on a range of contextual information, such as your location, whether you're physically moving or not, your schedule, and so on.

"Google Now can display similar routing and traffic notifications for places that the user intends to go, by scanning the upcoming appointments in the user’s calendar. When the user approaches a mass transit station, the software displays transportation schedules. It can also inform the user when they are close to points of interest—but living in the incredibly dull suburbs outside of LA, I have yet to see this feature in action," Paul wrote in his piece.

But Google Now can do other things too, like examine your past search history in order to find out which sports teams you follow regularly or whether you've looked up a flight recently. The service will then start offering you notifications with updates about this information. Or, as Ars Technical Director Jason Marlin pointed out, Google Now can remind you that visitors are in town based on forwarded itineraries in your e-mail, or alert you that a package is out for delivery—all without you having to set up those kinds of notifications.

There will certainly be users who don't like the idea of Apple automatically filtering through their e-mail or constantly reading their GPS location. But it should be something you can opt in and out of easily. And for those of us that are more comfortable with such a feature, wouldn't it be nice if Siri could perform these same (or similar) functions?

Quick settings in the Notification Center

There are some device settings we just plain use more than others on a daily basis. For me, it's the Wi-Fi on/off toggle on my iPhone, because my very Comcastic home Internet connection can't seem to stay up when I need it. For others, it might be the screen brightness control, the Do Not Disturb switch, or the Personal Hotspot toggle.

Android users are able to access certain settings via their own version of the Notification Center, allowing them a quick and easy way to toggle these without having to jump all the way out of an app, into the Settings app, and back. As reviews editor Florence Ion said, "It’s frustrating having to switch back to the settings to take care of the brightness if I’m in the middle of watching something on Hulu."

If you could pull down the Notification shade while inside of a third-party app, you could adjust the brightness (or turn off Wi-Fi, or turn on Do Not Disturb) without having to leave the app in the first place. At the very least, a feature like this would greatly reduce the number of taps required in order to get a task done, thereby simplifying the usability and making the iOS experience that much more enjoyable.

Autocorrect and spelling suggestions

It's no secret that Apple's method of offering spelling suggestions and autocorrect can be a huge frustration for iOS users. You're just typing along with your thumbs when iOS decides something you've written—perhaps street names or just plain obscure words—isn't right. At this point, iOS begins to tell you what word it's going to autocorrect to if you don't tap on your original word to tell it "no." If you're like me, you tap on your original word over and over and over with your fat fingers, but iOS autocorrects to its own word anyway. Then you have to backspace over the entire thing and start over—usually battling with iOS yet again over the spelling of your original word. Wash, rinse, repeat.

And, of course, there is no directly user-editable word dictionary in iOS. You either have to enter your obscure words as text macros (which is not exactly the original intention of that feature), or simply hope the app in question eventually figures out the spelling you wanted after entering it a thousand times.

There has to be a more elegant way of doing this, right? Android users seem to have the better end of the stick when it comes to handling autocorrections and spelling. When typing out a weird word, the OS will offer alternate spellings as buttons above the keyboard. But more importantly, if it manages to autocorrect your word to something you didn't want, a single backspace will restore the original spelling. And, it will ask you if you want to add that word to your dictionary to boot. For the sake of all our sanity, Apple should adopt this kind of autocorrect behavior, stat!

The ability to set default apps

You know the drill: perhaps you prefer Chrome over mobile Safari on your iPhone, but every time you tap a link from e-mail it opens in Safari anyway. Or perhaps you like Google Maps or Waze, but anytime you try to get directions from another app, it forces you to use Apple's Maps app. There's no way to change which apps are used by the OS as defaults for these actions—you're held hostage with Apple's own apps as the default.

Do iOS users know how to beat a dead horse on this topic? Yes. But that doesn't make this feature any less desirable, especially since our Android-using friends get to throw it in our faces all the time. When they launch a new browser, the OS asks them if they want to set it as the default—thanks to the fact that Android can recognize when you have multiple apps installed to perform similar functions. Alternately, they can change their default apps in their settings by going into an application manager to choose whether that app launches by default for certain functions.

"The nice thing is that with pictures, for instance, I can select which app to edit in without going into another app and looking it up in the gallery," Ion said. Indeed, while perhaps not every iOS user wants this feature, enough of us care about it to make it a worthwhile addition to iOS.

Home screen shortcuts to places within apps

iOS allows users to set home screen icons that act as quick bookmarks to Web apps or other Web pages in Safari. This is pretty convenient, but you can't use that same functionality to set a shortcut to a "page" or functionality within native apps. Our Android friends can, though, giving them easy access to certain information without having to navigate there every time.

"I can set a shortcut in Google Maps Navigation as an icon on my homepage. For instance, if I’m lost in the car and need to get home, all I have to do is press the icon that I made and it launches the Navigation to my home address," Ion said. "I know that iOS has this for bookmarks and the like, but I like being able to do this with specific applications."

Indeed, there are numerous iOS apps I use on a regular basis that force me to navigate all the way through several screens before getting the information I want. If I could create a new home screen icon that links directly to a certain functionality within an app—third-party or otherwise—it would significantly cut down on taps. (And in the winter when it's 11°F outside, that means less time with my poor, uncovered flesh being exposed.)

This may be the least likely of all the suggestions here, but it's one that could be potentially useful to the greatest number of users. Just think: how many of you have at least one iOS home screen shortcut to a Web page? Exactly.

What else?

We're sure you're eager to tell us which features you think should be brought over from Android. Or perhaps you have ideas on how to better implement some of the suggestions we offered. Either way, let us know in the comments what you think. The most interesting, weird, or just plain creative ones may make their way into a followup post.

My biggest complaint is any functionality that involves a tap-and-hold gesture. I want it to do something instantly, not wait for me to hold my finger down on the screen for some period of time.

Another issue is anything (eg: webpages) where tapping twice performs a different action to tapping once. This is a huge design mistake, since it means the first tap cannot fire until after it has given up waiting for the second tap.

These are hard things to change without causing support nightmares with your customers, but I hope Apple does it - and the sooner the easier it will be. There is no user interface element (that I know of) on OS X where they have made this design mistake. For example you can single or double click a file to perform different actions, but when you double click the first click still performs the "click" action.

Apple should start respecting their customers, by allowing to use their devices as they see fit. It should officially start selling jailbreak apps on iTunes.

If you're a geek, sign up for a developer account. It costs about the same per year as one month of your phone bill.

That will give you a certificate where you can sign your own apps and deploy to your own devices without going through Apple. Just go to github, click the "clone in mac" button, open the project in xcode and hit "run". Bingo, the app is installed.

It's even possible to deploy binaries this way if the developer doesn't want to hand out the source code, although it would require some kind of shell script to apply the certificate to an already-compiled binary. This could also be combined with a shell script that deploys the app (perhaps by presenting a QR Code on the screen, which you scan, and then your custom self-signed app will install). It can be done today without any changes from Apple.

Personally I think the security of the app store is worth it for regular customers, and I have no issue with tech savvy users needing to sign their own apps. Malware is a huge problem and getting worse on desktops. It's not a problem on iOS.

My biggest complaint is any functionality that involves a tap-and-hold gesture. I want it to do something instantly, not wait for me to hold my finger down on the screen for some period of time.

Android has a long press feature, too, but you can set the timing length on it if you don't like the default behavior. Does iOS not?

You can't change it, but I'm happy with how long the delay is (much shorter and people would trigger it by accident), I want them to remove the delay altogether, things should happen within a millisecond of me touching the screen, not after a moment.

I think the double tap delay is 250 milliseconds. It's so short you don't even notice... until you use something that has a 0 millisecond delay.

Home screen shortcuts to places within apps can already be made with no action by Apple.Apps can register themselves as the default handler for a uri scheme, and handle the urls as they like. So users can use home screen bookmarks to access any part of an app addressable by uri.

So this should be a request to more app developers to make more parts of their app addressable by uri.Although I suppose Apple could help by encouraging devs to do so, or by making it easier to save those home screen bookmarks from 3rd party apps...

Apple should start respecting their customers, by allowing to use their devices as they see fit. It should officially start selling jailbreak apps on iTunes.

If you're a geek, sign up for a developer account. It costs about the same per year as one month of your phone bill.

That will give you a certificate where you can sign your own apps and deploy to your own devices without going through Apple. Just go to github, click the "clone in mac" button, open the project in xcode and hit "run". Bingo, the app is installed.

It's even possible to deploy binaries this way if the developer doesn't want to hand out the source code, although it would require some kind of shell script to apply the certificate to an already-compiled binary. This could also be combined with a shell script that deploys the app (perhaps by presenting a QR Code on the screen, which you scan, and then your custom self-signed app will install). It can be done today without any changes from Apple.

Personally I think the security of the app store is worth it for regular customers, and I have no issue with tech savvy users needing to sign their own apps. Malware is a huge problem and getting worse on desktops. It's not a problem on iOS.

Your argument works for a curated store (like OSX and Android), not a walled garden (like iOS).

I have no problem with the *default* being to deny third party sources. But there should always be an option to let those of us who are willing to accept the risks do what we want. Suggesting I should have to pay for a developer account just to get such basic functionality is ridiculous.

I don't know if this is an Android feature, but I'd love some sort of email account auto-completion. I setup a macro for the first 4 letters of my home email, but that's less than ideal macros don't always work with every input in every app because the only way to get the macro to complete is to press Next or Space, and some apps don't allow that.

I have 4 keyboards installed (US, Emoji, and a couple Japanese IMEs), why not let me add a "keyboard" that's just common phrases I want to use. Pre-populate it with your contact settings, but let user's add and remove things.

Actually just allowing apps to register new keyboard IMEs might be the way to go (and would be a really cool way to access password managers, for example).

I shouldn't have to launch a third party app to scan a QR code, especially since many of them are buggy and/or full of ads.

Of course NFC would be even better, but QR codes are backwards compatible. Perhaps the two could be combined, swipe a "scan" button on the lock screen, it brings up the camera and (in some future hardware model) activates the NFC chip.

I'm not an iOS user, but from having to deal with them at work:* USB HID support: YubiKeys are great...except for iOS users.* NFC: As above, for YubiKey Neo* OpenVPN support: more efficient than L2TP, more secure than PPTP, totally unsupported on unjailbroken iOS despite quite a few threads requesting it.

No no no! There is only one feature that Apple REALLY needs to take. I just got an iPad through work. It was not a personal decision. I needed to support people that use them so I got one. I barely use it because the on screen keyboard is so horrible! Thank you Logitech for your bluetooth keyboard case. Otherwise, I think I might have just sent it back.

They must take the ability to have any kind of keyboard you want like Android has. Apple iOS has the worst keyboard on any tablet or phone. The best keyboard for Android, in my opinion, is Swiftkey. Not only does it have arrow keys, but it can do swype keyboarding as well.

Apple has the worst input of any device because they don't allow any innovation or choice on keyboards. What a mistake.

For instance, my mom's first name is Marty, I have a buddy who's last name is Martinez. If I type "mart", it brings up both in a dropdown-style box; tap one to select, or keep typing to enter a new address.

On the iPhone, one of the problems I have with getting paged (text messages) is that the originating number increments up each page, so it's not all under one contact. From the conversations view of the messaging app, you cannot mass-delete. Each iOS update I hope for this, but it never happens.

"I can set a shortcut in Google Maps Navigation as an icon on my homepage. For instance, if I’m lost in the car and need to get home, all I have to do is press the icon that I made and it launches the Navigation to my home address," Ion said.

I am currently using both Android and iOS, I can say that the thing that frustrates the hell out of me the most is the iOS keyboard, in combination with trying to select a specific point within text. When I go to make a correction to something I have typed, iOS seem to mostly select the end of the word instead of where I want the "cursor". With Android it mostly gets the right place and if not, there are the arrow keys to make life easier; iOS requires me to hold down and find the correct spot.

Other than the above, the back button in Android is great as it is located near your thumb and is a lot quicker than pressing the top right of the screen. I just find it a lto easier.

You can adjust brightness on iPad with multi touch gestures. Can you not on iPhone?

Not with a single gesture, no. You have to do a 4-finger swipe up, swipe across on the multitasking bar, swipe to change the brightness, then a 4-finger swipe down to close the bar.

The greatest lack in iOS is adjustability, being able to make your own settings. It does not break the security to manage your own set of gestures, turn features on and off, change the number and spacing of icons on a screen, adjust timings, and so forth. A lot of this is done in Jailbreak, and none, if offered by Apple, would challenge security in the least.

In these cases, it's nothing more than Apple (a) maintaining a universal appearance and functionality for aesthetics, and/or (b) the common trait of Apple to "keep things simple," usually meaning "keep things featureless." Neither makes sense, as the devices could be simple enough for people who need it and be complex enough for those who want it... and maintaining a single appearance and functionality so that all units have Apple's "perfect" or "just so" appearance is all at once fatuous, vain, and condescending.

@Jacqui - You can easily undo an autocorrect in iOS - just backspace to the end of the word (usually one tap of the backspace) and you'll get a popup with your original uncorrected word that you can select.

Seriously, the number of complaints I get about users mysteriously chewing up 'x' GBs of data and that they did nothing/connect to anything is just tiring.

Users want consistency and stability, and not be surprised by a bill shock at the end of the month because of some synchronisation/update

/note: this is in Australia

Absolutely. This and the iOS keyboard are why my wife will never forgive me for 'upgrading' her old HTC Desire HD with SwiftKey to an iPhone 5 when her contract rolled over. And then I went and got myself a Galaxy Note II, and the fact that I'm now the one enjoying a big screen and ridiculous battery life sealed the deal - my nerdvice has lost 75% of its value, as I'm clearly saving the good stuff only for myself; good thing no one was leveraging it to prop up the world economy.

Of course the camera on it is awesome, which is what she'd asked for. So I can't be totally at fault, here. But seriously, if we could just get a little more flexibility with the keyboard input options... The "You'll get used to it, and might even find you prefer it" line works about as well as you'd expect in any given situation.

Instead of just quick access to specific settings, we should be able to use Siri to control it. Imagine... "Siri, turn on WiFi", "Siri, lower brightness to 30%", "Siri, activate do not disturb".

This feature can't get here soon enough. (It's kind of surprising to me that this capability isn't even present in Android.)

If you're enthusiastic and like a little hacking, you can configure it to do it with a mixture of Tasker and Utter - along with any other voice command you can think of - but I agree, it's strange such a basic command is not there in vanilla android.

I'm not entirely sure that voice command is a better replacement for navigating the control panel in all situations though. Alone it's fine - but I travel a lot on public transport and I'm sure people would look at me strangely if I started saying commands like that at my phone.

They must take the ability to have any kind of keyboard you want like Android has. Apple iOS has the worst keyboard on any tablet or phone.

Part of that is just what you are used to. I personally found the all of the Japanese keyboard offerings on the Nexus 7 akin to a root canal in comparison to iOS's (even though I find the iOS auto-"correction" feature just as annoying as everybody else), but that needs to be taken in the context of a) I've used the iOS keyboard a lot longer than the Nexus, and b) a lot of people reach the complete opposite conclusion.

Having said that, would a third-party software keyboard be a good idea on iOS? Sure. It's a massive potential security hole--is there a better place to plant a keyboard logger than...a keyboard?--but the walled garden approach should cut down significantly on that risk.

I'm not an ios user, but can't you install custom keyboards on ios? On Android there are at least three-four different choices. I use the standard android keyboard that comes with the device but most of the people I know use 3rd party apps.

They must take the ability to have any kind of keyboard you want like Android has. Apple iOS has the worst keyboard on any tablet or phone.

Part of that is just what you are used to. I personally found the all of the Japanese keyboard offerings on the Nexus 7 akin to a root canal in comparison to iOS's (even though I find the iOS auto-"correction" feature just as annoying as everybody else), but that needs to be taken in the context of a) I've used the iOS keyboard a lot longer than the Nexus, and b) a lot of people reach the complete opposite conclusion.

Having said that, would a third-party software keyboard be a good idea on iOS? Sure. It's a massive potential security hole--is there a better place to plant a keyboard logger than...a keyboard?--but the walled garden approach should cut down significantly on that risk.

True, true. I'd be happy for them just to add some (even optional) improved functionality themselves, I don't know that people are too hung up on needing 3rd parties to get in there. It's not like the availability of and competition from 3rd party keyboards has done a lot to improve the default android keyboard(s) anyway. I definitely prefer the iOS keyboard to the default android one, personally...

So it's really a matter of easier text-caret positioning/insertion, better dictionary control, and perhaps some options around better predictive (as opposed to such a heavy focus on 'corrective').

Wow, I can't believe neither the article nor any of the comments have mentioned two of the very best Android features: auto updating apps and background downloading from apps.

It's such a dumb process on iOS to see that little App Store number keep incrementing up then have to review and update the apps. If you've got apps that you wanted to use, you have to wait for all the updates to finish. I love that android just updates them while you're not using the device and gives you a little notification to see its been done. Plus, you can turn off auto updating on a per app level if you really want to.

The other one is great for apps like Pocket. I can't count how many times I've gotten on the subway, fired up Pocket in my phone, then realized I didn't update before i left. It's been awesome having Pocket on my Nexus update as soon as I save an article without ever having to take it out of my bag.

They must take the ability to have any kind of keyboard you want like Android has. Apple iOS has the worst keyboard on any tablet or phone. The best keyboard for Android, in my opinion, is Swiftkey. Not only does it have arrow keys, but it can do swype keyboarding as well.

Architecturally that actually get's handled by the "let users choose default apps" on Android. Intents/contracts are the operating system feature we should have gotten in Windows 95.

Not being able to load 3rd party keyboard layout is definitely hurting in some aspects, especially when OS X gets far more layouts than iOS.

For instance, only one Korean keyboard layout is available for iOS, when OS X has no less than four, IIRC. Not only that, there are some well-known (and royalty-free) keypad-style inputs that are readily available on Android OS handsets released in Korea, but obviously none are available on iPhone. There are lots of users who are used to the keypad-style inputs and have difficulty adapting to the QWERTY style layout for the small screen.

I'm quite used to the one and only Korean keyboard layout Apple supplies with iPhone, what with 3 years of use, so it's not a problem for me. Still it's a limitation that I think iOS can avoid, if possible.

Besides, seeing that Japanese inputs on iOS fare much better, I have a suspicion that it's a matter of Apple just not caring enough for the Korean audience. If you're going to put the users out to dry, at least give us the possibility of getting alternatives from someone who cares more.